Resumen de The vertiginous power of decisions: : Working through a paradox about forced migration
My purpose here is to work through a paradox about the life trajectories of certain people who fall under the category “forced migrant.” The argument arises from my reflections on an intensive period of fieldwork with a Somali man, Asad Abdullahi, who fled his home in Mogadishu at the age of seven or eight and has had to flee various makeshift homes ever since.
Asad and I met in September 2010 in Cape Town. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old at the time—he is not quite sure—and was living in a shack settlement on the outskirts of the city. Two years earlier, he had had to flee his home and his informal trading store in a township of Khayelitsha with a mob on his heels; he had been caught up in a now famous episode of public violence, popularly known as South Africa’s xenophobic eruption, in which more than one hundred thousand people throughout the country, most of them foreign nationals, were forced to abandon their homes (Misago 2009)
